Brewing decks for kotei

L5R Malaysian Kotei is only around 2 months plus away. The new set, Torn Asunder will not be legal for this kotei since the release date is late Feb 2013 (within a month of legality, too tight for people to get cards). With no new set over the horizon, it’s obvious we have to test with the remaining card pool.

Being loyal to Phoenix, it unfortunately limits my deck choices. Fortunately for me, Phoenix is not in a bad position, there are few deck archetype for Phoenix, so I’m testing all the available choices.

While testing, we got a few random interested players and I realized that none of the players here have any newbie friendly decks. We are used to building efficient decks that when we have a few new recruits, we realize its hard to ‘teach’ new players due to the intricate decks we build.

So I set out to build a ronin deck. I don’t exactly have the decklist with me, but roughly this is what I build.

Holding runs on farm scheme.

The only non-farm in there is 1 incense mill, 2 travelling peddler and 3 charter of legion of 2k.

Event runs Never Enough Soldiers to recur all the destroyed followers. I considered running Aviary, but realise that its too slow and being a promo, not easy for newbies to get. (I know I’m being hypocrite on Charter of 2k, but hey, its ronin… so its in theme)

It didn’t do too well in the first test run mainly since I still have some actions in the other decks so I ran substitutes instead, depowering the deck somewhat. Example is Sundering Strike slot I replaced with Incapacitated. Brawl with Sinkhole. No siege volley and a few more. I was trying to keep the count of promo and rares low.

But it was refreshing, it runs via swarm and I enjoyed it…. Until I need to tweak it….immediately….